April 10, 2009

It's tough to learn from failure, without tarring
everyone and everything. There is no silver bullet out
there that people either don't understand or have chosen to ignore.
Frankly, trying to turn a country around, put in place sustainable
development investments, and encourage people to live their lives as
farmers, shopkeepers, what-have-you, in a near-war zone is just about
the hardest task ANYONE has attempted to do in the relatively brief
history of development assistance.

That's not to say that
mistakes then don't get made, but hopefully the lessons will be of a
subtle nature (as are the problems) rather than simply a wholesale
assumption that whatever has been tried is wrong because it's not
successful.

The problem really is one of mismatched expectations
and possibilities, and how one ramps up from small, tactical success to
strategic change.

Expectations and possibilities. For me, the
primary problem
is often the impatience which comes from the lack of impact. Getting a
country on the edge to make major changes is often a glacial, not a
rapid, effort, one that requires consistency, humility and a focus as
much if not more on human interchange than budget flows. And that's in
a country where people aren't trying to derail the whole effort by
killing and maiming citizens and development workers. You add into that
the very short tours of duty of USG military and civilians, and the
problems are just escalated. (And this is a point that needs to be
remembered: simply increasing the numbers of USG employees in
Afghanistan will not necessarily lead to more effective development
programs if they still can't get out to work with people, and they
leave after a year).

Ramping up impact. It's human nature to assume that one can
expand impact by simply increasing the resources thrown at an issue.
Want another 10 miles of road built? Get more road crews out there.
Want to make the successes in one province in providing security more
prevalent in other provinces? Send in more troops. But from what I
read, the Army senior staff and most AID staff have reached a similar
conclusion - it's not just MORE that leads to success, it's BETTER,
with a commitment and understanding of what it takes to be truly
successful - there is a real need for knowledge management.

In fact, more of something (JUST more troops, or
JUST doubling the AID budget) can be counter-productive. In the case of
development resources, THE fundamental dilemma is just how DOES one
replicate, ramp up and make strategic the types of small interpersonal
exchanges that actually drive the development process? It's not just a question of increasing the
budget that will lead to an expansion of success, but in the
careful focus on those characteristics that led to success in the first
place (again KM). Nothing kills the potential impact of a small $1,000 investment like saying you'll throw out of a truck an additional million dollars.

March 03, 2009

Just a quick note on an area desperately in need of quality KM. And let me be purposefully blunt: one of the biggest threats to quality impact in terms of development in Afghanistan (and Iraq) is the loss of knowledge caused through short rotations. And it's not just factual knowledge but knowledge about relationships, and trust. It's possible to pass along facts about money spent, and miles of roads built, but to pass along trust and understanding between an expat and an Afghan farmer, or government worker or teacher is much, much harder. And for USAID this is made much worse by the fact that tours do not end en masse, so the potential for group training is severely limited.

While it's true that stabilization activities usually aren't long term 10-15 year interventions, they usually build on themselves; I can't think of many that truly can be started, implemented and assessed within the timeframe of a USAID employee's tour.

On the other hand, local staff and grantees and contractors often carry that institutional knowledge, but the transfer from one group to the next is haphazard and incomplete. And yet still in most USAID posts the systems to transfer knowledge and experience are rudimentary at best. If ever there was a demand for knowledge sharing it should be in environments with such extremely short tours.

The issue of knowledge loss during staff transitions is a key HR problem that is being badly addressed by most agencies in the first place. Then when you add into the mix these very short rotations, and the newcomer's human tendency to want to put his or her mark on the program, rather than just following the past approach, means that lessons learned, contacts, relationships, and most fundamentally the prospects for achieving success can easily be forgotten.

I think this issue should be in a forum on HR practices and knowledge loss. Let me end though with a true story, somewhat abridged:

In the mid-1980s USAID was just gearing up to return to Madagascar after a decade-long hiatus, as the country threw off some of its Marxist rhetoric and embraced the West. During those early years before a full Mission returned to the country, USAID carried out a series of exploratory assessments, to see what had changed over the intervening years, and what the country's new priorities might be.

While USAID didn't expend program dollars during that decade, it had programmed substantial quantities of food aid, and a chunk of the local currency coming from that program had been used to carry out a series of small grant activities. An Irishman in the capitol working part time for USAID was given the job of assessing all of the self help/local currency investments in activities such as woodlots, tertiary irrigation repair, and the like. He visited most of the 250 small, isolated sites and wrote a short report on each. He was one of the few people (even among the Malagasy) to visit all of these locations, and the findings were invaluable.

And to assist in making the reports useful, he bought a huge map of the country, framed it, and stuck color coded pins in the map, with a key flagging the type of intervention. In a pre-GIS world, this was a really a remarkable effort. 4 years go by, AID sets up a Mission and new staff cycle in to both the USAID mission team and to the Embassy. I visit on TDY from Nairobi, and I can't find the map. I look and look, but no map. Then on my debrief with the Ambassador on the way out, I glance around at his office and there, behind a palm frond, is the famous map. But missing are the related site files, the key, and most important the pins themselves. So I say to the Ambassador, "Sir, nice map." And he says, "Yes, thank you, except for all of those damn holes all over it"...

Would be funny if the implications for a place such as Afghanistan weren't so serious.

February 19, 2009

Anyone who thinks development is easy to do, that it is essentially about expending money and not about ideas and sensible strategies and tactics is kidding themselves. I think both the military and civilian worlds drastically underestimate the difficulty and subtlety of each other's core work. The trick then is to learn some of the art, and understand some of the risks, before we all assume that the other person's job is pretty easy. I think that should be part of the joint planning process - not just in having both the civilian and military staff in the same room at the same time, but to try to be understanding of the other's perspective, and strengths.

AID I think gets a bum rap from those who view it as only interested in the very long term, when often they are focusing on the underlying conditions, and capacity. Still, AID does need to be faster, more nimble, and responsive to the governance and legitimacy needs of the here and now.

Short term wins often need to go hand in hand with long term strategic change. A quick example: In Liberia we had a long term contract to assist the Government to reconstruct and reform the obliterated power sector. To do this properly would take time, and a focus as much on capacity and skills as on replacing miles of copper wire. All fine, but the new President had a problem; she was about to be sworn in in Monrovia, a place without a working power grid for years. If she couldn't show tangible, quick results NOW, in the time frame that the average person could grasp, she would not be given the luxury of five years to build up capacity.

So the program did two things - it worked on the long term, so that the power sector could be sustained and managed by the Liberians, AND when the President was sworn in, she pressed a button and the lights down the main street of Monrovia went on. Was either more important than the other? No, but without those lights no one would have been given the time to carry out the longer term work, but if the only thing that happened was that an American team was able to put up a small generator and light up part of the town for a few months, the overall prospects for a sustainable power sector would remain bleak, and the President's own political future would be at risk.

What I think this implies in the case of civ/mil work is NOT that both sides should compete to outdo the other's area of comparative advantage, but that both sides play to their strengths as part of a unified team - that USAID programs and CERP funds are designed and implemented with common strategic objectives, even if there may be differing time lines and approaches.